The Trouble With Time
by background-chan
Summary: Things would've been so much better, he thinks, if the girl he came across didn't have a taser on her and knock out the somewhat-hostile alien that was chasing him. (Full summary inside) AU


Summary

Things would've been so much better if the girl he came across didn't have a taser on her and knock out the somewhat-hostile alien that was chasing him. Then again, things would've been shot to hell had she not taken a slime bath and made a jar of ground glass to keep him alive.

(Things would've been perfect either way with Rose beside him, but then again, it couldn't get any worse.)

* * *

The truth was, he wasn't funny. He wasn't full of jokes, wasn't the clown people made of him. They thought he was kidding all the time, but the truth was that that most of the time he was dead serious, he just said things with a smile.

 _And that's me,_ he thought.

 _All smiles._

He wasn't fun either, no matter what his companions might say, (his companions, _his_ companions, _his compa_ —) but he'd like to think that he at _least_ wasn't _boring_. Thing is, not just anyone can say that they've successfully outrun an angry, sentient explosion and enjoyed themselves. He's always attributed the grins he sported on those occasions to exhilaration, but the truth was, that was just his scared-face.

Yes, his scared-face. Monkeys did it, why couldn't humans?

 _And that's me,_ he reflected as he ran for his life.

 _A human._

A very _scared_ human right now, somewhat confused and desperate, but those were all still _human_ emotions, so his frontal lobe was still (barely) functioning after that Hy'd'jeon disrupted its electrical activities. He was still ready to eat a pickle and pumpkin cake for some reason, but he could at the very least temporarily escape the imminent danger, which was what he was currently doing.

The TARDIS rocked violently to the side, throwing him off course and sending the giant ball of tentacles that was chasing him tumbling into the kitchen. He didn't have time to trip again (which he did, but no one was there to remind him of that) and he didn't have time to right his ship's course; instead, with the floor now a wall, he slowly made his way to the door, which was still closed through some blessing of an alien god.

He was much taller than the average human, standing at a little more than six feet. It was usually a (very painful) inconvenience, but this time it came to his advantage; he managed to reach the keyhole of the now-horizontal door and hastily inserted the TARDIS key.

Unfortunately, with more height comes more chances of falling. The ship narrowly avoided another planet, lurching to the side and as a result throwing him off to the side and into the wall…floor. He wasn't severely inconvenienced, but it _did_ give the alien that was chasing him enough momentum to roll out of the kitchen and into the console room, placing him directly into its line of sight.

It screamed.

He screamed louder.

Turning the key suddenly seemed impossible because although he was already used to working under intense pressure (excelled in it, even) this body wasn't. It was quite literally only an hour old, and he didn't have the chance to break it in before the all hell broke loose and—

The door decided to swing open in the exact same moment the Hy'd'jeon chose to propel itself forward, and the Doctor (not the Doctor, never the Doctor, never will be—) suddenly had the distinct impression that everyone in the vicinity, including the vicinity herself, didn't appreciate being thrown around. He pondered on this because he'd caught sight of the autopilot switch and the emergency-landing button next to it and realized the choice that was presented to him: on one hand, flipping the switch would switch the "floor" with the proper floor while on the other hand, pressing the button would provide an ideal escape route, provided he made it out of the TARDIS in time; on the _other_ hand, flipping the switch would reduce the effects of space turbulence while on the _other_ hand, it would be much quicker to just press the button and hope that there was a celestial object to land on; on the _other_ hand, not landing would trap him inside with a very hostile alien, _but on the other hand_ —

He had to stop himself there, because that was already six hands, and the Hy'd'jeon had enough of them as it is.

Flip the switch, press the button, flip the switch, press the button, flip the switch…

Managing to avoid the Hy'd'jeon's outstretched tentacles, he launched himself towards the console at the last second and slammed his palm onto it.

The Tardis shuddered, stopped.

Silence filled the room, and the aliens made brief eye contact.

Then everything was _weightless_.

It was a very dangerous gamble, this. Prolonged exposure to zero-gravity plus high pressure would kill _anyone_ in a short amount of time, even an advanced organism like himself, and it was never certain whether you would implode or explode, but he had hoped the autopilot would lock onto a planet's address fast enough for the emergency-landing to successfully take effect. Using them both would drain the power, he was sure, but recharging the TARDIS was the last thing on his mind at the moment.

He felt his blood pressure go up with alarming speed and his joints started aching. Through his double vision, he was able to see wormlike _things_ erratically swimming about, probably the dreaded tentacles. He felt like a planet was sitting on his head, but at the same time he felt like it was going to explode.

The pain lasted probably only around a minute, but his _very human_ brain made it feel like hours. (Rassilion, even now he sounded so much like a human with his whining about physical pain. It wasn't like he'd never done so before, but he at _least_ sounded dignified. He forgot for a moment that all of his complaints were made inside of his head, where no one and nothing but psychics could hear them.) By the time it was over, he'd already lost his primary senses and immediate motor functions. He just hoped that the alien he was trapped with lost those too. (He would be grateful it it lost more than that as well, but right now he could settle for anything.)

(He realized that he shouldn't have said that.)

 _The gravity is working,_ was his first thought. So either she malfunctioned and there was just enough power for the gravity to turn back on, or the TARDIS found a planet with enough mass to have Earthlike gravity and landed on it. His second thought was a prayer, that he wouldn't open the door and immediately be engulfed in flames. In any case, his brain was still too scrambled to send a single nerve impulse to the tip of his nose so that he could stop being so _numb_.

(He also realized that one of the Hy'd'jeon's tentacles was positioned uncomfortably close to his head and _squirming_.)

 _Oh, Rassilion,_ was his second thought.

 _I can't move my arms._

Which was necessary for getting back up, as when gravity was reintroduced to the room, he had fallen unceremoniously on his face. Given the fact that the mostly-unfriendly alien that had technically chased him halfway across the galaxy was succeeding in regaining its motor functions whereas _he_ was lying paralyzed in the ground…he probably needed to get up right about now.

Thirty seconds found him testing his arm out, his hand spasming and his shoulder stiff. His legs weren't working either, but he could at _least_ feel a part of his foot. Meanwhile, his new alien friend was able to lift two tentacles at a time before tiring out. It was a race to see who would recover the use of their body first. On one hand— _no, never mind, don't want any extra hands_ —while his tentacled friend was able to recover quicker, _he_ had a smaller body, which so far had come to his advantage. He just hoped that it would make itself useful again, just one more time…

He finally managed to get himself off the floor (whoopee, he supposed) when it apparently decided that the best course of action was to ram itself into the wall. Now, this wouldn't have mattered much (he would've happily let it knock itself out) had it not decided to ram its disgusting head to the wall _right next to him_.

He screamed again, which he would later regret as he realized he sounded like a female, as the TARDIS tipped over and took him with it. He folded over quite unceremoniously and ended up with his head between his knees, a very uncomfortable position for tall people, though not one they usually find themselves in often; it just so happens that the Doctor often finds himself in unusual circumstances.

Such as being trapped between a rock and a hard place, so to speak, except that "rock" is a spaceship doorway and the "hard place" is actually a squishy, slimy place, but he was never one for specifics. All he really needed to know was that at least half of him was wrapped in tentacles and the other half was out the door, and that was a problem.

A problem he had an easy solution to, he concluded, as he spotted just the object he needed.

The Doctor was never a man of violence. Never was, never will be.

But this brainless ball of tentacles had boarded his ship, wrecked his kitchen, stranded him on some godforsaken planet, and covered him in green alien goo.

The rock made precise contact with the Hy'd'jeon's eye.

Quickly withdrawing his foot from its grip, he kicked the door shut with more force then probably necessary. It was too big to go through it anyway, but closing it would at least prevent unwanted attention. How it managed to get on board in the first place involved celery, a rubber mallet, and an untested teleportation device.

He hastily dusted off the dust that had unfortunately gotten all over his blue (TARDIS blue, invented the color) suit, fingering the residue on his shoulder. Mostly dry but damp, either it rained a while back or it's morning mist. Checking the sun's place in the sky, he assumed it was the latter. He studied the sand some more, holding it up to the light as he used it to refocus his brain. Some dirt mixed in, small sedimentary rocks made in a body of water, so near a body of water then. The stones had been in prolonged contact with salt water judging from the chemical weathering, so ocean then, probably beach—

— _wait a minute_ —

The newly-created Meta-Crisis Doctor swore, kicked a random stick, and screamed bloody murder for the third time that day, ignoring how several seagulls tore away from the area as a result.

His TARDIS was a sitting duck.

 _He_ was a sitting duck.

And he was stuck _in Cardiff_.

* * *

 _A'N: Another story that's probably gonna end up as a mess, but I have high hopes for this one. Quick summary of this chapter, in case you couldn't decipher my terrible form of writing:_

 _The Meta-Crisis Doctor, who is apparently very bitter about being human, is being chased by a Hy'd'jeon alien while his TARDIS is spinning out of control. He presses both the autopilot switch and the emergency-landing button in the hopes that the TARDIS would land faster, as a result stranding him in Cardiff with a depleted TARDIS and an angry alien inside it._

 _Hope you enjoyed it, please leave a comment or review if you do. Until the next update!_


End file.
